Health News: Tribute to the inventor of the pollen count – Alexander Fleming’s registrar

Published: 9 December, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

‘Grandfather of allergy’ saluted

A FILM celebrating the life of a  nona­genarian doctor who worked with Alexander Fleming – has received its premiere at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.

As well as being the famous discoverer penicillin’s registrar during the 1950s, 98-year-old Dr William Frankland survived a Japanese prisoner of  war  camp during the Second World War.  

He then went on to become an allergy consultant at St Mary’s.

The Marylebone resident, who still practises medicine and is known to colleagues as the “grandfather of allergy”. He is also the man who devised the pollen count.

He was at the first screening of the film, Bill Frankland – A Life in Allergy, on Novem­ber 24, along with several of his former patients, including one who had travelled all the way from Wales to be at the event.

Dr Frankland said: “I knew Alexander Fleming as a student and got on with him extremely well. 

“I had to see him every day at 10 in the morning  to tell him what was going on with the patients in the ward. 

“He was a wonderful man and I liked his teaching and admired him very much.”

He added that he had invented the pollen count “to give the lay public a way of conceptualising the cause of their allergy. 

“People always assume the cause is something they can see – so they thought it was down to roses – and they do not consider causes they cannot see.”

He said that allergy – when the body’s immune system reacts against non-harmful particles – was still not fully understood, but added that the “hygiene theory” held that it was increasing. 

Greater cleanliness, he said, harmed the development of children’s immune systems.